When talking with Access customers, we often hear about the key role that Access reports play for decision makers looking to draw powerful insights out of their business’s data. The desire for Access to provide a fresher, more modern data visualizations – as well as a streamlined process for creating those visualizations – has been prominent in these conversations as well as in other channels such as User Voice.

Today, the Access team is excited to unveil our response to these concerns: a new set of cleaner, more descriptive Access charts that provide more ways to visualize your data and present it in a new and modern way.

Say hello to the new and improved Column, Line, Bar, Pie, and Combo charts! Each of these chart types can easily be added to a form or report to visualize your data and help you make more informed decisions.

Column Chart

Line Chart

Bar Chart

Pie Chart

Combo Chart

Each chart can be customized to fit your specific needs using the new and intuitive Chart Settings pane and the familiar Property Sheet. Use these features to change the style and layout of the chart, add chart elements like legends and data labels, and fine-tune the fonts and colors.

Modern and Classic Side By Side

We realize that many existing customer solutions rely on the current (aka classic) charts, and those solutions will continue to work – you’ll just have more options to choose from. Access developers can use the new charts alongside the classic charts within the same solution, and transition to the new charts at the pace they desire.

Feedback

We hope you’ll give the new charts a try – we’d love your feedback! We’re always looking for more ways to improve.

You can leave comments here, or use the Send-A-Smile tool in Access to let us know what you think of the new chart experience.

It's important to see the renewed commitment by Microsoft in support of Access desktop platform.Ms Access is by far the best FE tool for RAD development and new features can only improve it ...Thanks in particular to Michal for the commitment and enthusiasm to share all the news with the community !

@James Muka AFAIK as of today there is still no "exactly". This is what can be said according to MS sources:

Modern charts are coming "very soon" in O365 and they will also be in Access 2019, which is announced for the second half of this year, i.e. not quite so soon. There aren't specific dates for both yet. Meanwhile you can study the initial documentation.

The modern charts don't appear to have the granular controls of the classic charts, such as the ability so specify the scale of the major and minor units on an axis. Is this correct? Or am I just not finding the new controls for managing axis scale?

Hi Michal, Could you take a look at the data label formatting on the stacked charts please? When there are large and small datasets, the data labels on Column stacked are forced to overlap and are unreadable. It's a little better in Bar mode, but the labels are drawn very close to the end, meaning its still unreadable. Example Colum https://postimg.cc/BL6677bc Example Column https://postimg.cc/HrMTScmx The text colour isn't consistently applied between black and white either in the orientations as you can see, and ideally the font and size would be exposed to the legibility can be increased. Thanks, Paul

It's definitely exciting to see modern charts added to Access. But, after playing around with the new control a bit in Access 2019, it appears they're not as robust as the old pivot charts yet. Hopefully they prove to be popular and the team can enhance them in the future :)

I included an image below of a chart I'd like to recreate with the new chart control. It illustrates two of the most important things I'd like to accomplish:

1. Show tool tips as the user hovers over data points

2. Vary the fill color for different points in the same series

Regarding #2, in this particular example, analysts use the chart as a guide to determine the number of quarters that will be used to generate a trend line for future prediction. They move the slider bar to select the number of quarters and the chart dynamically fades out the unselected quarters and redraws the new trend line. With the old pivot charts, we would simply modify the fill color of an element of the points collection. I don't see that capability in the object model for the new chart object. I can get the same final look by dynamically modifying the chart's row source to include multiple series that look like a single series. But requerying the row source in the new chart object is laggy and visibly redraws the entire chart, causing it to disappear and reappear. I can get a smoother effect by playing with Echo but the result is still not clean.